If the UFC's CM Punk experiment ends here, what does that say about it?

If the UFC's CM Punk experiment ends here, what does that say about it?

So it turns out that Phil “CM Punk” Brooks is not only one of the worst fighters to ever debut in the UFC, he’s also one of the highest paid. This isn’t exactly surprising news, but it’s still stubbornly affecting.

If you looked around the MMA Twitterverse after news of disclosed payouts from UFC 203 emerged on Monday, you saw plenty of fighters feeling some kind of way about those numbers. The former pro wrestler with zero fights to his credit made half a million bucks just for showing up, and that doesn’t even factor in rumors of points on Saturday’s pay-per-view broadcast from Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland.

Was it more than he deserved? Depends what you think that word means.

From the standpoint of pure fighting ability, obviously Punk (0-1 MMA, 0-1 UFC) didn’t earn that paycheck. He’d never had an MMA fight before he debuted in the UFC, and his welterweight bout with Mickey Gall (3-0 MMA, 2-0 UFC) made him seem more like a victim than a participant.

If what you’re paying for is fighting skill, then you clearly overpaid for Punk. He successfully executed zero offensive moves. He pulled off one effective act of defense, which was then immediately undone by his opponent. Paying an MMA fighter $500,000 (again, just in base pay) for that is the equivalent of giving a landscaper a thousand bucks to cut your lawn, only to have him stumble off the truck and run over his own foot with the mover.

But we know – and, in fact, have known from the start – that the UFC wasn’t terribly interested in whether or not the 37-year-old pro wrestler could fight. He was there solely because people would pay to see him, the MMA version of a bearded lady.

In that sense, seems like Punk did his job. He convinced us that he was just a hard-working guy living a dream, and whether we paid to see the final act of that show or just to see the ruse violently exposed, point is we paid.

But now that the checks have all cleared, it seems perspectives have changed. UFC President Dana White didn’t see any problem with letting Punk live his dream in the UFC once, but now he’s decided that future installments might have to get dreamed somewhere else. Even those in the media who defended the UFC’s decision to give Punk one fight don’t seem to want another.

That’s a tricky line of reasoning to follow, though. If your argument was that Punk deserved (again, a strange word in an MMA context) a fight in the UFC because a) he wanted to do it, and b) he was famous enough that people would pay to watch him, then what’s changed?

According to Punk, he still wants to fight. And if your argument is that people won’t pay now that they’ve seen how bad he is, what are you admitting about what just happened?

What, now that you’ve paid your two bits and got a look at the bearded lady, only to come away thoroughly unimpressed with both the quality and quantity of her facial hair, you feel like you’ve been scammed? Time for the carnival to pick up and move to the next town?

The story headed into Punk’s debut was that he was a regular-ish guy (who also happened to be famous) who was putting in the hard work to live out a dream, even if it came with considerable risk of painful humiliation.

For this, we praised his courage, his daring, his refusal to let the haters get him down. Then he got in there and got wrecked, and still we cheered his willingness to try. Then we saw what he got paid to try, and we reasoned that he had earned it because we had paid it.

If we’re saying that’s a trick that only works once, aren’t we still saying it was a trick? And if we don’t mind having paid for it – as long as it’s just the once – aren’t we saying that we enjoyed our time at the carnival, even if we won’t be sorry to see it pack up and go?